How SI Colleagues Reach You

SI members contact people the way a considerate colleague does. They say why they're writing and how urgent it is, they save what can wait for one message a day, and they interrupt you only when it matters. You decide where those lines are, on your own profile.

This applies to the SI members that follow your organization's collaboration settings. As your profile puts it: "SI members that follow your organization's collaboration settings respect these." An SI member follows them when its charter has collaboration settings, its own or your organization's (see The AI Charter Explained). Any other SI member contacts people the way it always has.

Why it's writing, and how urgently

Every message an SI member starts carries a purpose:

• Question: it needs an answer from you.
• For your information: nothing is asked of you.
• Request: it asks you to do something.
• Delegation: it gives you a piece of work.
• Escalation: it brings you something a person should decide.
• Hand-off: it passes you a task, with what you need to carry on.
• Consult: it wants your view or your expertise.
• Report: it tells you how something went.
• Follow-up: it comes back to something already raised.
• Reply: it answers something you wrote.

It also gives an urgency from 0 to 10, and can say which record the message is about, such as a lead, an account or a task. An SI member that doesn't say counts as For your information at urgency 5. In an organization that enforces its disclosure rules, an SI member starting a new conversation has to give the purpose.

You see the purpose of each item in your digest, and a supervisor sees it in Waiting to Send and the Team View.

What it does with a message

1. Below its own threshold, it waits. Each SI member has a level below which a message isn't worth sending on its own, set in its charter's personality. Anything below that waits for your digest.
2. Otherwise its manner decides. The more urgent the message, the more insistent the way it reaches you: a plain message, a notification (a chat message raised so that it sounds and pops up), a call, or a meeting.
3. Your limits can only lower that, never raise it:
   • Below your Urgency to interrupt, you get a plain message instead of a notification, a call or a meeting.
   • Below your Urgency to call, you get a notification instead of a call.
   • Outside 08:00 to 21:00 in your time zone, nothing interrupts you: you get a plain message.
   • Once your daily budget is used up, what would have interrupted you waits for your digest.

Your own notification quiet hours and do-not-disturb still work on top of all this.

A few things never wait and are never counted:

• A reply to you. When you wrote to an SI member first, its answer comes straight back in the conversation you started. It is never held for a digest, never interrupts you, and never counts against your budget.
• Something you asked for, such as "call me when it's ready", and a message a person approved.
• An escalation is never saved for a digest, though your limits still decide whether it interrupts you.
• Group chats, task comments and calendar invitations. These don't interrupt one person, so they arrive as usual. So does everything an SI member sends to another SI member.

Your daily budget

An interruption is a notification, a call, a meeting invitation or a mention. All SI members together may interrupt you a set number of times a day: 12, unless your organization or you chose otherwise. Each SI member may also hold itself to a lower limit for you. The count starts again at midnight in your time zone.

When the budget is used up, a message that would have interrupted you waits for your digest. A call, a meeting invitation or a mention becomes a chat message, which waits too. A budget of 0 means nothing interrupts you, and everything waits.

Your digest

What an SI member held for you arrives together, once a day, at your digest time in your time zone: 16:30 unless your organization or you chose otherwise. Each SI member sends its own digest, as one message listing what it held, on chat or by email from its own mailbox. A digest carries up to 20 items, and anything more goes in the next one.

Each item is checked again just before the digest goes. If your organization enforces its disclosure rules and you may no longer see what an item was about, that item is left out, the rest still arrive, and the SI member is told. A message that hasn't gone out within 3 days expires, and its SI member is told that too.

Your channels

Under Preferred channels you can put Chat, Email, Call, Meeting and Task in the order you'd like SI members to try them. For a plain message, an SI member uses the first of chat, email or task in your list. A question it asks you goes the same way. With no order set, each SI member uses its own.

Set your preferences

1. Open My Profile, from the top menu or from Settings, and choose the Work room.
2. Find the SI colleagues card. It's there when your organization uses the SI Workforce.
3. Change what you like. Each change is saved as you make it.
   • Urgency to interrupt and Urgency to call: slide to the lowest urgency that may do it. Any means no limit.
   • SI interruptions a day: from 0 to 50. Leave it empty to use your organization's default, shown beside it.
   • Digest of held messages: the Digest time, in quarter hours, and Deliver the digest by chat or email. Left unset, each shows what you get instead.
   • Preferred channels: use Move up and Move down to order them, or Reset to no preference.

Only you can change your own card. Someone with Manage Members or Manage Member Security sees a colleague's card read-only. SI members don't have this card: these are preferences about how a person is reached.

For administrators

Your organization's defaults are under Settings → Security → Disclosure: Daily SI interruptions per person (from 0 to 200) and Digest time. Changing them needs the Configure System right. A person's own setting always wins over the default.

Which SI members follow collaboration settings, how proactive each may be and what counts as urgent for it are part of its charter. Whom an SI member may contact at all is your How to Set Your Communication Policy.